Hi everybody,

It's been a while since my last post in here, and I wish I could say I've been busy painting, practising, exercising, but work takes up all my time these days, I'm afraid. It's the upcoming ghost of Christmas, and working in retail, 'tis not necessarily the most wonderful time of the year, at least not for this guy!

A week ago, I visited my parents in my home town of Stavanger, and it was a really nice break. Coming back to Oslo, on the airport express, I was presented with some beautiful vistas of early winter farmland. I love watching the passing landscapes from a train seat, and as usual I shot some photos with my phone, thinking they might make for some decent painting subjects down the line. Today I finally had some time and energy to sit down and paint again, practise some basic skills, a luminous sky which didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, some wet in wet distant trees, some that worked and some that didn't, but all in all, the scene turned out alright - as in there are some good bits in it. It's quite obvious that I had no plan regarding the foreground, but I wanted the buildings in the distance to be the main focal point. I find that these distant "farmscapes" make for really nice subjects for practising a lot of the basic skills: You can paint whatever sky you want, and you really don't need very much detail anywhere. You'll get to practise your timing skills, in that you'll often need some far distance trees/mountains, and there is usually a good lesson in creating perspective and scale.

Anyway, a lot in this scene could be painted far more successfully, but I'm still practising, and I find that some skills are starting to "stick", which is a nice feeling!